ER doc pulls double shift as nature photographer
On any given day, Jennelle Marcereau could either be treating a heart attack patient or taking a long hard look at a fern.
“I get the same sense of satisfaction out of diagnosing a patient as when I have captured the essence of a landscape in a photograph,” Marcereau said. “I feel like I’ve nailed it, I’ve figured it out.”
Marcereau, 50, is an emergency room physician at MultiCare hospitals in Pierce County.
On weekends and international journeys, she is an accomplished nature photographer.
NATURE VS. NURTURE
The digital revolution did away with expensive film and challenging chemistry. It also swelled the ranks of amateur photographers.
Marcereau comes from the pre-digital era of photography.
“I was 10, and all I wanted was a camera,” she said of her youth in Michigan. “I loved photography.”
Marcereau pursued it seriously in high school. She won awards and received a full scholarship to an art-and-design school in Savannah, Georgia.
But she turned the scholarship down.
Her father was a family physician, and she followed the family business to college.
“I always felt like medicine was something I had to do and photography was just for fun,” Marcereau said.
She completed her residency in emergency medicine in Detroit.
Marcereau moved to Washington state from Michigan in 2004 at age 37. Beguiled by the state’s natural beauty, she shifted her photography to the front burner.
“I love being outside,” Marcereau said. “It’s like having a fishing pole as an excuse to be outside.”
Although she travels with other photographers — they’re the only ones willing to start a hike at 2 a.m. to find the perfect shot — she leaves her people work in the emergency room.
“I tried (photographing) a wedding one time, and I’d rather do an ER shift than shoot a wedding,” she said. “I enjoyed it, but it was very stressful.”
On a hike outside of Bella Coola, British Columbia last summer, she was hit by a hailstorm.
“We were climbing up these rocks that I had no business being on,” Marcereau said. “I just didn’t look down.”
As if on cue, the storm broke and sun bathed a nearby mountain range.
“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time,” she said.
After the trip, Marcereau posted photos and video of that trip to Facebook.
A TV producer came upon the images. Since then, a possible reality TV show about Marcereau has been in the works. She’s even hired a publicist.
In December, she took her images to the country’s premier art fair, Art Basel in Miami to gain broader recognition.
ADVENTURES
There have been occasions where Marcereau has mixed both aspects of her life.
On a 2006 nautical expedition to the North Pole, she shot photos while practicing medicine as the ship’s doctor.
“We started in Murmansk, Russia,” she said. “Within a day we were breaking through ice.”
The ice — and the stark gray landscape — never quit.
“We could have stopped after Day 1 on that trip and somebody could have told me that we were at the North Pole, and I would have not known other than a GPS telling me the coordinates,” she said.
In the last 15 years, Marcereau has taken photography trips to Antarctica, Greenland and many countries in South America as well as Canada and the United States.
While on a 2017 trip to photograph the northern lights in Canada’s Yukon Territory, the trip leader complained of a sore throat. The leader wasn’t a man who normally complained about much, Marcereau said.
“I knew in my mind he had a peritonsillar abscess because there’s just not that many things that would make a guy like that complain about a sore throat,” Marcereau said.
Her diagnosis was correct and the man had to be evacuated from the wilderness.
The rest of the trip wasn’t much fun for the remaining party, she said.
“It snowed almost the entire time we were there, and there was basically no place to get warm except in your sleeping bag,” Marcereau said. “You wake up and there’s ice over everything and you wonder, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
Still, she was able to salvage the trip during a stormy hike up into the Tombstone Range.
“It was fall there, so all the tundra vegetation was on fire — beautiful reds,” she recalled. “The sun came out and the clouds lifted just for a few minutes, and I got a shot of the mountain range.”
An image from that trip made it into her show at Art Basel.
That story — not giving up when there seems to be no hope of making a good photo — happens frequently to Marcereau.
She’s had a fascination with Washington’s Mount St. Helens since 1980 when she saw ash falling from the sky at her Michigan home.
Since moving to Washington, she’s made several trips to the mountain.
On a trip in summer 2018, she put her gear away after rain chased all the other photographers away. She had been longing to photograph wildflowers against the volcanic backdrop.
“I saw this little ray of sunshine coming through, and then the clouds started lifting,” she said. She quickly hoofed it back to the visitor’s center parking lot to get her gear.
“Nobody was there,” she said. “I looked up and there was a rainbow. I was literally dancing by myself.”
The photo she made of paintbrush flowers, misty clouds, the mountain turning orange and topped by the rainbow is on her website.
“You have to be patient, and you have to wait it out,” she said. “And you have to go back. There’s always a shot, but you don’t always come home with what you expected.”
REALITY VS. FICTION
Heavily manipulated photos are in vogue across social media sites like Instagram.
Marcereau processes her photos as photographers have done for well over century: Lightning some areas of a photo and darkening others.
“I still want it to look like it did when I was there,” she said.
Marcereau does engage in some classic photographic effects. Most notable is the long shutter speed technique that turns waterfalls and creeks into dreamy white veils.
She shoots with a Sony and Canon camera bodies and lenses.
A tripod is a must, she said, when taking long exposures. Otherwise, she rarely uses them.
“I hate tripods,” she said. “They are so cumbersome.”
She is often asked by friends and acquaintances for photo tips.
“You need to get closer,” is her standard advice.
“Ask yourself, what is it about this scene that makes you want to take this picture? When you can answer that, you’ll know what to make as the focal point of your image,” she said.
Key to any photo: light.
After choosing a subject she calculates what time of day will produce the best light. Almost always the answer is at or near sunrise and sunset.
While Marcereau offers her photos for sale, she has no plans of making it her main source of income.
“It may take the joy out of it if I made it my living,” she said. “I’m not going to give up my day job.”